Forgive me: I wrote a tome on this kind of question in this comment.

This question is literally asking about the very bedrock of how a historian perceives society, culture, and reality. For that reason, it's probably the best question that you can ask! This is what professionals spend many years studying at universities to try and work out - what approach is best for me? What solves problems for me the best? What terrible flaws have I introduced into my work as a result? And we have to introduce flaws. People cannot be reduced, or redacted to a 'variable'; there are no 'controls', and the models we've been working on for the last three thousand years are broken in ways we can't fix, nor can even pretend to start to fix. Human beings are complex and ever changing conglomerates of time, space, experiences, relationships. And there is no such thing as 'dispassionate questioning'; there isn't and can never be 'complete and honest contextualization'.

How are we supposed to deal with that?

No one has the answer. If someone tells you that they "know the right way to do history" then they are smoking large amounts of something potent, and should probably be avoided. We do the best we can, with what we have.

Firstly, and most importantly though, I must vent my spleen into space. One does not apply the scientific method to history. Alas. The scientific method is a powerful problem solving tool, but just like you wouldn't use a jackhammer to assemble a chair, the scientific method does not work when discussing good history. The reason for this is pretty simple really; in science you break down the relationship between an object and a control in other to test a relationship between the two. This is done in order to disprove a hypothesis. It flows from Greek understandings of rationality, in that both knowledge and thus a problem can be categorised into smaller parts and solved separately.

History does not work like this. For one thing, history involves human beings at every step. There are human beings making the history, then human beings recording the history, then human beings sifting through it in order to find meaning. ((“Meaning” in this sense is the ideas and concepts that are produced in the audience for the historian's words – if it doesn't mean anything to an audience, then no one would bother with it. It would be boring and irrelevant by definition.)) Human beings are ambiguous, ambivalent, tremendously complicated masses of identities, that live in their own context and understand their world differently from day to day. This complexity is what makes a human being a human being, and not a cardboard cutout. It also makes “scientifically valid history” impossible. Historians are trying to model something that simply rejects any 'objective truth' (I have a problem with the word 'truth' as well as 'objective', but it gets my point across).

So what you're asking is – what have historians come up with to deal with this uncertainty? Because in our heart of hearts, every historian knows we can only put boundaries on the possible. By that I mean we can know borders about roughly what happened, but inside those borders it's almost a free-for all of possible meanings. Even memory, which people would think to be the most reliable of all the histories, isn't a recollection, but is instead your brain constructing what you reckon is probably important to you now (which is why you can't really remember all the “unimportant” stuff like what you had for lunch five weeks ago).

So let me tell you a very little about the tools we historians have come up with to deal with our problem, bearing in mind ALL of these tools are flawed in ways we are quite aware of but are powerless to fix. Also; that this is the shallow, tiny version of what these things actually are, and I insult the tradition of my craft with my reduction. I'm doing it anyway though, in the full knowledge people will pile into me and make a better case for each tool than I can.

• “Historical Narrative”. That is the first and oldest of all approaches to history (once we got into our heads the conceit that we could 'know what really happened, that is – before von Ranke in about the 1600s no one believed any such thing.) That approach is the chronological “these things happened” story, supposedly free from bias (hint: you can never be free from bias), with nothing caused by anything that went before, but everything conditional on the things that went before. I didn't eat that apple because the apple was there, but I was ABLE to eat the apple because it was there.

• Probably someone else will jump in with Marxism. Marxism reckons the above Historical Narrativism is a load of crock. You're going to get lots of people weighing in on what Marx was saying, and having read the entire bloody lot of him in German, they're all correct. The man wrote like overbred cows give birth; at some points it can be difficult to know what he is saying. Regardless, one of the biggest things most people take away from Marx is that he believed human behaviour to be economic behaviour. (As an aside, this ironically makes many captialist businessmen also Marxist to their toenails.) The individual was unimportant, and events were caused by economic factors bearing down on society. All that other stuff you've heard about revolutions and class warfare is layered on top of that one, revolutionary idea.

((Continued))

I don't know if I can answer this question but I will anyway and I guess it can be deleted if needed.

The theory I follow and use in my research is social structuralism, specifically written and theorized by Pierre Bordieu. He is a French humanist and philosopher who believed that social and culture status affected how different types of capital were distributed throughout history. I use this theory in my historical studies because it takes into account the social stats, the education level, and the cultural aspects of a person and how that affects their ability to create history. This is a term that Bordieu calls "habitus" and as he explains, it will affect people's lives and change history both consciously and unconsciously.

This works out well for my thesis research about ancient Mediterranean trade and the cultures involved because social status influenced every exchange. Only certain classes traded with other classes because of their social class, where they lived, and who they knew. Additionally, some Mediterranean cultures like the Phoenicians and Carthaginians were known as great sailors and merchants and therefore would get more trading partners around the Mediterranean. With a trade system without an overwhelming amount of currency, culture and social ideas played a large part in ancient Mediterranean trade.

So in sum, I like to use Bordieu's theory to describe history because not only does it include Marx's historical materialism theory but it also adds human intangible traits of culture. Plus, it effectively describes and displays the connections between being rich either economically or politically based on cultural values or social standing. This is something that resonants with me so much because these are connections due to social or cultural values have existed all throughout history and have influenced great historical change. And they are connections that still exist to this day and for this reason, social status and cultural values should be acknowledged when studying a person or people that are causing historical change.